Twilight

Today at the farmer's market, I bought a bar of soap called "Bella's Delight." It seems that my favorite local soapmaker has finally let herself sink into the Twilight mire. A couple of years ago, I read the whole saga without coming up for air. The books were poorly written and most of the characters seemed wooden. I thought that Edward, the dreamboat, was arrogant and controlling, and I thought Bella was a fool with a martyr complex. Still, I can’t deny that I continue to genuinely enjoy the whole Twilight experience and it’s something I’ve given a lot of thought to. And I think that’s because of the fantasy, not just of being an immortal teenager, but a teenager in love. We all probably had that first, messy liaison when we still had all the juice we would ever have, and all of it mostly aimed at that other teenager. All of those opiate love chemicals and all the colors and sounds more vibrant too. And now, having lost so much moisture to the natural maturing process, it feels good to remember those desperate times when things were such a big deal, and to hear a story in which things really do matter that much, and the dreamboat turns out to be Bella’s true love, rather than just an past embarrassment.

Suburbs

The suburbs of Salt Lake freak me out. I imagine how they came to be founded as splinter sects in the dull wilderness: a man or brothers or cousins with many wives in the middle of nowhere, where there existed only the political structure of family. Not an offshoot of cultural richness or even somebody’s Walden, but a churlish packing off to some wasteland in order to exert more power over the land, the women. I imagine the women, digging and sweating and birthing in their flour-sack dresses with raw hands. I think of young girls with hair long enough for a prince to climb, destined to marry some old man not of their choosing, to bear children, yet never to have sweethearts of their own. And now the places are mazes of great, airy houses made of inexpensive materials, dotted every couple of blocks with eerily identical ward houses. There are signs that say “Children at play,” but mostly the houses are silent edifices. These communities grow exponentially and are creeping out of the valleys and up the mountainsides.

Fresh Start

Today was the first Salt Lake farmer's market of the growing season. Veg was scant, but I did pick up some Swiss chard and baby beets. We listened to Tolchock Trio play (kind of Velvetundergroundy and actually a sextet), and it felt good to lie on my back on the cool grass and feel sort of warm and cold at the same time. It threatened rain pretty much all day, but the market was crowded. Part of why it felt so good to lie down was that I didn't have to look at the other people, and I could stop thinking about looking a certain way or the way they were looking. Don't get me wrong- everybody looked great. It's just that sometimes you don't want to look. Sometimes I think the steady decline of my eyesight is a subconcious wish that I have to just smell and feel more, and not have to look so much.

Stuff your face with value

It's impossible to identify the meaning of an era, because doing that means that it has ended. So I don't know what it means, but I will assert that our era is rife with products named with verbs ending in -ers. I think it may have started with crackers. Seems logical, right? Then there were corn chips with an indentation, and those were Scoopers. Then Stackers, I think, right up to Baconators and, the most stupid of all: Burrito Rollers from 7-11. Burritos were always rolled, right? (There's a wonderful billboard here in Salt Lake that encourages the population to "Stuff our faces with value" by eating the rollers. Is that like stuffing your face with virtue or integrity? Anyway, my theory is that these products seem like they are in the act of doing something. It makes us want to be there with them, because they are active and cool.

Photos

I used to love taking pictures, but I don’t do it much anymore. It’s nice to have a stack of old photos that you haven’t seen for years, a juicy apple to feed memory. The problem with seeing snapshots too often is that the memories can become fixed and trapped in the picture; like you can’t remember anything else about the day. Curse of nostalgia. The other problem is the overabundance of bad-quality images. When someone takes a photo now, my first thought is that I hope they post it on effing Facebook, and how it’s kind of like evidence that I did something. Also, (as mom has observed) there is a whole genre now of self-portraiture taken at arm’s length, usually angled to make the eyes look bigger, expression in the face windblown, determined, flirtatious at best, more often just kewpie. I think everybody’s done it, but I feel so embarrassed for the person. Photos, recorded music, these things can be junk food for the mind. We should limit ourselves on the cheap and easy and make sure we observe and hear good things. Why should the mind be abused when we’re so careful about our bodies?

Episode

This morning on the train, there was this horrid gurgling sound and groaning like an insane person behind me. At first I thought don’t look, it’s rude to stare and so embarrassing to be insane. But then I thought maybe it’s someone dying, so I did look. The girl in the seat behind me, in front him, had eyes wide with confusion. His arms rigid, flesh beet-red, mucous streaming, definitely dying (well, maybe not right now but maybe so). I called 911 without thinking at all. It was a crowded trainful of students mostly who looked aghast and cowlike. Upset and inexperienced with the world. I asked someone to hit the button. The driver came while we waited for the meds. “Oh yeah, he’s a regular,” said the driver, jostling him rudely. Does this unconscious man regularly have grand mals on your watch? Some students remark that he will not wake up like that after a seizure, but what we all want to say is quit being such an asshole. Does this redefine our situation here? He is visibly poor. Burden on the system (like me). Does it mean we jostle his body with distaste like a piece of wet trash that landed somehow on our shoe? Then the clean, strong, helpful medics do the same thing. They lift him out into the frosty morning, snoozing and exhaling his still unclean mouth like an innocent baby. God if only it were that easy.

Of all the things that occurred in 2009, I want to tell you about this:

I started a church job a couple of months ago and my first sing with them was Durufle's Requiem. During the Kyrie, I discovered a ladybug crawling on my shirt, which made me jump slightly, not enough to gather notice. I gently took it in hand, and there it stayed, tucking its little body into the space between my ring and middle fingers. The service wasn't overlong, but this creature and I stayed together for about an hour. I harassed it a number of times, thinking it might be dead, but it revealed nothing to me and held fast. Finally, we processed out into the garden, whence we came. I held out my hand and the bug traversed my finger and docilely went up the stem of a modest purple flower.

I wondered what its awareness could have been of its true situation, if it made a decision to stay on the great, moving vessel of my hand rather than fly away. I certainly considered putting it down, but thought it would have little chance of survival or happiness inside the church. But did the ladybug know that it was better to cower, and that I would not destroy it?

Life is like this. We all want to be safe and protected from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, but we never are. Whether we face it at every moment or never, we are all riding on a giant that could unknowingly crush us at any second. And it's so beautiful that this has not happened yet! I think that if there is such a thing as we call grace, it is this suspended moment, the clemency of time and chance to let us hover here for awhile in life.